Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Look, I’m a
Trekkie, I have been and ever shall be a Trekkie (Trekkies will see what I did
there). I’m not a Trekker. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, there are a
lot of definitions, but mine is this: a Trekkie is a light hearted diehard fan
who enjoys the ‘Star Trek’ franchise for what it is; good solid entertainment.
A Trekker is the kind of fan who questions everything about the franchise, such
as going to conventions and instead of thanking the actors who have appeared in
the shows over the years, they question why in certain episodes the said actor
pressed a certain button on a certain computer panel. You see the difference?
Good! Where am I going with this you ask? Well, bear with me for a little while
longer …

These days it’s
Chic to be Geek, and I’m a Geek. Although I have never had sand kicked in my
face (I’d like to see someone try), I have had to put up with the usual crap
that comes with being a Geek. Until now; the current upturn for sci-fi demands
that Hollywood make things cooler. And they don’t get cooler than J J Abrams’s ‘Star
Trek’ films. The first one not only established new actors in old familiar
roles, but also showed us how these characters came to be. We had Kirk, Spock
and McCoy all enrol in to Starfleet Academy. We see how they became the great
heroes we admire and love. We see the U.S.S. Enterprise on her maiden voyage,
already knowing that this ship and crew will be best and brightest of the
United Federation of Planets.

So now we’ve got the first film out of the way, it’s time for the sequel! And
this film is so much bigger than the first! IT IS HUGE! But does it make it
better? Short answer: Yes… Long answer: No… Confused?... Yes?... So was I,
until I sat down to write this review. You see, there are certain events that I
can’t discuss without revealing spoilers. So it’s really hard to say where the problems
lie. So to explain how, let me take you back to 1982; the film is ‘Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan’. This film is arguably the best of the original Trek films.
The crew of the Enterprise is pitted against the villainous Khan played
deliciously by Ricardo Montalbán. In the penultimate scene, Spock sacrifices
his life to save the Enterprise from certain doom (anyone who says spoilers
about a 1982 film, I have my phaser set to stun). While Spock lies dying Kirk
is told to hurry down to engineering to see his fallen comrade. The emotion of
this scene is raw and beautiful; it’s hard not to shed a tear, Kirk and Spock
brothers in arms unable to touch through a glass wall, Kirk unable to save his
best friend from the radiation that runs through Spock’s body. I defy anyone to
say that this scene was not a fantastic moment in Trek history!

Fast forward to
2013 and ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’. This film, as great as it is with its
fantastic special effects and gripping story line, lacks the emotional depth,
or soul as my better half put it. So whose fault is it? Well … it’s certainly
not J J Abrams’ and it’s undoubtedly not the actors - Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto excel as Kirk
and Spock, as do the rest of the cast. Having said that, the rest of the cast
are used sparingly and most of the time it’s just for comic relief, especially
McCoy who in the original Trek films was the emotional counterpart to Spock’s logic.
I can’t help thinking that downplaying McCoy as they did was a very bad
decision, seeing as Karl Urban’s McCoy was by far my favourite character in the
previous film. The antagonist of the piece is played by Benedict Cumberbatch of
Sherlock fame, who in my eyes is a fantastic actor but seems to be very two
dimensional in a three dimensional movie.

But I think the fault lies with the writers, it seems they started well but
couldn’t be bothered to finish the story properly! It lacks originality, which
is truly a shame. If they had taken the time to be more unique, this film would
have seriously been off the chart! This brings me back to Trekkies vs Trekkers,
if you are truly a Trekkie or have no Trek knowledge whatsoever you will love
this movie. But if you are a Trekker, well ... don’t say I didn’t tell you so!

So what’s next for the crew of the Enterprise? Abrams is off to do another ‘Star’
movie, but it’s of the ‘Wars’ and not the ‘Trek’. Will he return to the
franchise? Who knows? But if he does I will be there to welcome him with open
arms.

Friday, May 10, 2013

There’s a scene in ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ where
the screen is filled with a computer-mapped image of the interior of Chauvet
Cave in southern France – home to a veritable art gallery’s worth of
pre-historic cave paintings – while Herzog delivers an unusually ordinary bit
of expository voiceover. Cut to one of the technicians responsible for the
mapping, sitting at a desk, computer in front of him, discussing the mapping
work. Again, it’s all very typical of a documentary opening with the History
Channel’s logo. Then the technician happens to mention that he comes from a
non-scientific background; Herzog interrupts him and asks what he did before;
the man gives a self-conscious grin and answers that he was in the circus. And
– bingo! – we’re in Herzog territory good and proper.

While ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ – haunting music and
dream-like meditations on the unknowable past notwithstanding – is one of the
more orthodox entries on Herzog’s CV, it’s still the kind of film that only
Herzog could have made. The chance to film, in strictly regimented conditions
and with an almost draconian time limit, an area that will never been seen
except by a handful of scientific experts must have been irresistible to modern
cinema’s most passionate explorer. The historic importance of the paintings was
established very shortly after their discovery in 1994 and the cave was
immediately sealed off. Restrictions around access were imposed to preserve the
cave’s climate and conditions. Herzog and a crew of just three had to use
battery powered equipment and use lighting which gave off no heat.

Sure, it’s not as crazy as the “hey, there’s a small
island that might just get blown to shit by an active volcano, why not let’s
fly in?” aesthetic of ‘La Soufriere’, but there’s that same sense of race-against-time
filmmaking at work. Oh yeah, and he shot it in 3-D as well. (Full
disclosure/bone of contention: ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ came and went in
Nottingham cinemas in something slightly faster than the blink of an eye. I’ve
only seen it on DVD in bog standard 2D. It still rankles that I didn’t get to
see it on the big screen and in the original format. I think it would have
proved cinema’s only genuinely tactile use of the form.)

‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ is several things – the
least of which is a documentary about cave paintings. It’s about memory,
perception, dreams, and the passing of time. And it’s an act of liberation. It
takes the sealed Chauvet cave, wrests it from the hands of researchers and
academics, and makes a beautiful and richly textured gift of it to the world.

Sunday, May 05, 2013

There were two criticisms of ‘The Look of Love’ that
followed me into the cinema like a couple of Chihuahuas snapping at my ankles.
The first was that Steve Coogan’s central performance was little more than
Steve Coogan plays Alan Partridge playing Paul Raymond; the second was that the
film lacks a moral centre.

Both are accurate. Both are kind of the point.

‘The Look of Love’ – an examination of the life of
British porn baron Paul Raymond, from his money-spinning property deals to his
notoriety as owner of “revue bars” (i.e. strip clubs) and publisher of
top-shelf magazine ‘Men Only’ – is so effective in its evocative of the grim
seediness of Soho in the 1970s and 1980s (the principle decades in which the
film is set) that the comic baggage Coogan will always be fated to bring to any
role is a positive relief. His arch delivery of much of his dialogue sees him
firmly in on the act. Having said that, a knowing directorial decision to play
on his established persona should not detract from the due acknowledgement:
this is Coogan’s best outing as an actor thus far.

The facts of Raymond’s life (as espoused by the film)
boil down to a simple series of events: Raymond makes some serious money as a
property baron, fancies himself as an impresario, opens a member’s only
nightclub featuring exotic dancers, makes a shitload more money, drives his
choreographer wife Jean (Anna Friel) away with all his philandering, takes up
with soft porn starlet Fiona Richmond (Tamsin Egerton), and invests financially
and emotionally in his daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) as his corporate successor,
only for her to go off the rails in spectacularly self-destructive style.

It’s referenced on at least four occasions in Matt
Greenhalgh’s screenplay that Paul Raymond was born Jeffrey Quinn. That he
reinvented himself on arrival in London as a young man, shedding his
Liverpudlian background, is a snippet of backstory that Raymond delivers as well-rehearsed
press-conference banter in two scenes set years apart. The inference is that ‘Paul
Raymond’ was an elaborate façade that Jeffrey Quinn disappeared into. It’s a
reading born out by a despairingly revealing sequence where his son from an
early, previously unmentioned marriage, turns up at Raymond’s vulgarly
over-designed penthouse and tries to learn something about the father he’s
never known. Raymond gives him a slap up meal, breaks open some good champagne,
and can’t wait to show him the door.

Coogan’s performance gives us Paul Raymond as,
variously, a little-boy-lost charmer who (it would seem) invested his property
millions in shows and wank mags purely to meet girls; a raconteur who throws
out erudite conversational snippets and self-deprecating one-liners and
effortlessly manipulates his associates into doing his bidding; and a man who,
for all that he indulges his daughter to the max and dotes on his
grandchildren, has a complete moral disconnect even when his lifestyle coils
its licentious tentacles around those dearest to him. The two most shocking
scenes portray Debbie’s cocaine use. In the first, Raymond catches her using
for the first time, and his only admonition is that cheap shit bought on the
street is cut and could contain anything – “if you’re going to do this, buy the
good stuff”. In the second, Debbie announces, distraught, that she’s been
diagnosed with breast cancer. Dad and daughter do a big fat line of
commiseratory coke together.

Poots knocks it out of the stadium as Debbie Raymond.
Her winningly gauche performance of the eponymous ballad over the end credits
gives the film what small claim it has to a human element. She nails the
character’s fluctuation between intense vulnerability and fierce
competitiveness. In her scenes with Coogan, ‘The Look of Love’ has the focus of
a Jacobean tragedy: the misguided patriarch, his personal relationships
self-sabotaged, tries to justify his wanton excesses by living vicariously
through his daughter, only to broker her destruction because she is unable to
survive the very lifestyle that sustains him.

All told, ‘The Look of Love’ is downbeat and then
some. Director Michael Winterbottom makes no bones that, for all Raymond’s
protestations that he wasn’t a pornographer, ‘Men Only’ was a grubby and
unaesthetic delivery system for gynaecologically blunt images of women. Two
‘Men Only’ photoshoots are depicted and, for all the T&A on display, they’re
utterly unerotic. Same goes for the handful of sex scenes, bodies stacked up
against each other like marble slabs.

In scene after scene, Raymond tries to convince people
he’s living the dream. He name-drops; he parades his nubile girlfriends and the
gadgets that litter his apartment; he laps it up when someone likens his
penthouse to a set from a Bond film. He goes everywhere by Rolls Royce. He
employs a chauffeur. And in scene after scene, Winterbottom takes a scalpel to
his lifestyle: cuts through the pretence and the egomania and the
self-delusion; hacks away at the absurdities – some of them pathetically funny,
others just plain sad – of what a man becomes when he lets money define him.

Hence the necessity of Steve Coogan and the Alan
Partridge persona. It takes a comedian to make all of this palatable. And it
takes a comedian to give us, with just the right degree of pathos, the tears of
a clown as the curtain falls.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

In scene after scene – dockyard shoot-out; protagonist
chained up in basement; heroine chained up in villain’s lair; arbitrary shots
of hookers and beauty pageant contestants – its clear that ‘Iron Man 3’ is un film de Shane Black. This works to
its benefit and detriment in roughly equal measures. To its benefit in that
Black’s script is a godsend after to Justin Theroux’s rambling, unfocused ‘Iron
Man 2’ screenplay. To its detriment in that you can never quite shake the
feeling that Black would have been happier if Tony Stark were a burnt-out
alcoholic cop with a shady past and didn’t go around wearing a flying metal
suit.

Which isn’t to say that Black doesn’t deliver two
big-ass set-pieces involving the suit: one involving some sky-diving, the other
at the aforementioned dockyard (involving, to be honest, a fuckload of flying
metal suits). It’s just that the rest of the movie doesn’t seem to be in the
same key.

Herein the problem: the bits of the film that work do
so because they’re demonstrably Shane Black moments; but these moments are not
in the key of Tony Stark. And what made the first ‘Iron Man’ such an unexpected
delight – and such a smash success; it was ‘Iron Man’, after all, that
kickstarted Marvel’s five-year box office supremacy – was Robert Downey Jnr’s
unapologetically showboating performance as Stark. Billionaire, genius and
philanthropist wrapped up in the same flamboyant package as playboy, smartarse
and arrogant twat – every facet of his character held in such perfect
equilibrium as to make him irresistibly entertaining.

And yet ‘Iron Man 2’ had him depleted and riddled with
self-doubt, while this new instalment sees him traumatised by the events of ‘Avengers
Assemble’. Hence, a Tony Stark who suffers panic attacks, a Tony Stark who
burrows into a cocoon of introversion, a Tony Stark whose latest refinements on
the suit are riddled with tech issues that leave him vulnerable. Hey, folks,
remember the Tony Stark who partied with hot chicks, dealt one-liners like a
card-sharp cutting a deck, and drove the most expensive model Audi have ever
built like the freeway was his own personal race track? Yeah, I remember him
too, and I miss the dude. Can we have him back next time, please?